Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me – that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

— Anne Lamott

202. “But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.”

— Anne Lamott

203. “When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.”

— Anne Lamott

204. “I just try to love and serve everyone, and bring everyone water, and lend an ear; that’s what Jesus said to do.”

— Anne Lamott

205. “The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.”

— Anne Lamott

206. “We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.”

— Anne Lamott

207. “Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.”

— Anne Lamott

208. “Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.”

— Anne Lamott

209. “No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.”

— Anne Lamott

210. “For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.”

— Anne Lamott

Featured in: Book Quotes

211. “A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It’s a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.”

— Anne Lamott

212. “I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.”

— Anne Lamott

213. “Laughter is the key that grace has arrived.”

— Anne Lamott

214. “It is in many people’s best interest for you not to find yourself, but it only matters that it is in yours, and the whole world’s, to proceed.”

— Anne Lamott

215. “If you’re lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There’s only love, you’re made of love.”

— Anne Lamott

216. “I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.”

— Anne Lamott

217. “God makes a way out of no way.”

— Anne Lamott

218. “When you love something like reading – or drawing or music or nature – it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great.”

— Anne Lamott

219. “Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.”

— Anne Lamott

220. “It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.”

— Anne Lamott

221. “How alive am I willing to be?”

— Anne Lamott

222. “Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.”

— Anne Lamott

223. “Feeding a baby is like filling a hole with putty – you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and get it back in, like you’re spackling.”

— Anne Lamott

224. “The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God’s identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it’s the truth.”

— Anne Lamott

225. “Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength.”

— Anne Lamott

226. “Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck.”

— Anne Lamott

227. “My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don’t wait for inspiration.”

— Anne Lamott

228. “One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.”

— Anne Lamott

229. “He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.”

— Anne Lamott

230. “It feels like I’m babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.”

— Anne Lamott

231. “Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.”

— Anne Lamott

232. “There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.”

— Anne Lamott

233. “And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That’s what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.”

— Anne Lamott

234. “Also, I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I’d always had a thin waist before. Now there’s this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack.”

— Anne Lamott

235. “That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.”

— Anne Lamott

236. “When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.”

— Anne Lamott

237. “I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon – because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.”

— Anne Lamott

Featured in: Book Quotes

238. “Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.”

— Anne Lamott

239. “A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light – in other words, through life – registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.”

— Anne Lamott

240. “So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer – please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written.”

— Anne Lamott

241. “My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It’s not anything lofty, and it doesn’t have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor.”

— Anne Lamott

242. “I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.”

— Anne Lamott

243. “I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don’t love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I’ve been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.”

— Anne Lamott

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

244. “People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.”

— Anne Lamott

245. “I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.”

— Anne Lamott

246. “I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I’d hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.”

— Anne Lamott

247. “My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.”

— Anne Lamott

248. “Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.”

— Anne Lamott

249. “Quiet, deep breath after any prayer is another form of Amen.”

— Anne Lamott

250. “I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist.”

— Anne Lamott